38. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

listened on Libby

298 pgs.

2025
Genre/Level
Finished 8/3/2025
Goodreads rating: 4.12
My rating: 4.25
Setting: contemporary tiny island off the cost of Antarctica, home of the world's seed bank.

My comments: At the moment, not really sure how I feel about this story.  It was tragic from beginning to end.  It was beautifully written, a tangle of facts that were given to the reader in a wonderful way.  It was slowly paced, though a little to slow in places.  But the pictures it drew in my mind!   Quite something.  And how do you frate a story that pisses you off and entertains you at the same time?  Very difficult.

Goodreads synopsis:  A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late―and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.

MOVIE: Julieta

R (1:36)

Opened 12/21/16 in the US

Viewed Sunday evening, Feb. 12, 2017 at Carlisle Theater, Downtown Carlisle
IMBd: 7.1/10

RT Critic: 84   Audience:  75
Critic's Consensus:  Julieta finds writer-director Pedro Almodóvar revisiting familiar themes -- and doing so with his signature skill.

Cag:  4.5 Liked it a lot, excellent movie

Directed by Pedro Almodovar

El Desio

In Spanish with subtitles

My comments:  What a very sad moivie!  set in Madrid with occasional forays to the countryside/seaside, and ultra-depressed woman in her 50s writes a journal to her estranged daughter, who has been gone from her life for 12 years.  Two different actresses play the 25-year-old and the 55-year-old, and they are both terrific.  I always love getting into reading the subtitles as I try to take in everything that is going on in the scene.  It uses a lot of different parts of my brain, and I'm glad to see I'm stil up to it, ha ha!  This is a really good movie, but the overwhelming sadness/depression (it's everywhere, within every relationship in the story!) takes the rating down just a little bit for me.

RT/ IMDb Summary:   (RT) After a chance meeting, middle-aged Julieta (Emma Suarez) learns that her long-lost daughter has resurfaced in Madrid. This begins a painful reflection by Julieta into her checkered past, flashing back to the moments of pain that defined her current life.  (IMDb) Julieta lives in Madrid with her daughter Antía. They both suffer in silence over the loss of Xoan, Antía's father and Julieta's husband. But at times grief doesn't bring people closer, it drives them apart. When Antía turns eighteen she abandons her mother, without a word of explanation. Julieta looks for her in every possible way, but all she discovers is how little she knows of her daughter.

MOVIE - Manchester by-the-Sea

R (2:15)

Wide release 12/16/16

Viewed 1-30-17
IMBd: 8.3/10

RT Critic: 96   Audience:  79
Critic's Consensus:  Manchester by the Sea delivers affecting drama populated by full-bodied characters, marking another strong step forward for writer-director Kenneth Lonergan.

Cag:  6 - It was generally an awesome movie in every way (though very sad and depressing if you dwell too much).

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Amazon Studios

Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler

My comments:  A happy-go-lucky family man that drinks a little too much becomes a hollow shell of a man after a great tragedy.  The story isn't sequential, it's cyclical, so the story of Lee's past slowly unfolds and we see why he is the empty man of the present day.  And this story doesn't get the happy, hoped-for ending -- he's lost too much and knows what he's capable of.  And more importantly, what he's no longer capable of.  A great movie.  One of the most depressing movies ever.  
AFTERWORD:  Casey Affleck got the Academy Award for his performance.  Well deserved.

RT/ IMDb Summary:  Lee Chandler is a brooding, irritable loner who works as a handyman for a Boston apartment block. One damp winter day he gets a call summoning him to his hometown, north of the city. His brother's heart has given out suddenly, and he's been named guardian to his 16-year-old nephew. As if losing his only sibling and doubts about raising a teenager weren't enough, his return to the past re-opens an unspeakable tragedy.

MOVIE - Hello My Name is Doris

R (1:35)

Limited release 3/11/16

Never wrote down when I saw this, 2nd quarter of 2016
IMBd: 6.7/10

RT Critic: 83   Audience:  77
Critic's Consensus: Hello, My Name Is Doris is immeasurably elevated by Sally Field's remarkable performance in the title role, which overpowers a surfeit of stereotypical indie quirk.

Cag:  2.5 It was okay

Directed by Michael Showalter

Red Crown Productions

Sally Field

My comments:  This just made me sad and depressed.  I thought I'd like it a lot more than I did.

RT/ IMDb Summary:  When Doris Miller meets John Fremont, her company's hip new art director, sparks fly-at least for Doris. In the cluttered house she shared with her late mother, Doris mines the Internet for information on her one-and-only, guided by the 13-year-old granddaughter of her best pal Roz. When Doris begins showing up at John's regular haunts, she wins over his Williamsburg friends. Her new life brings Doris a thrilling perspective, but also creates a rift between her and her longtime friends and family, who believe she's making a fool of herself over a guy half her age. Eager for all the experiences she has missed out on, Doris throws caution to the wind and follows her heart for the very first time.

13. The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

listened to in the car - the last one in my 07 Malibu.....
2012 Random House
294 pgs.
Fantasy/Dystopia Adult (coming-of-age, YA)
Finished 2/24/16
Goodreads rating: 3.63
My rating: 2
Setting:  Contemporary/futuristic San Diego, CA

First line/s:  "We didn't notice it right away.  We couldn't feel it.  We did not sense at first the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin."

My comments:  Wow.  This was tough to rate - the writing was wonderful, but the story was so terribly depressing that I dreaded listening to the story.  I have no idea where the title came from, and the ending (which was quite unsatisfying) just happened.  The words, though, were beautifully crafted!

Goodreads synopsis:  “It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . . Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
          Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a stunning fiction debut by a superb new writer, a story about coming of age during extraordinary times, about people going on with their lives in an era of profound uncertainty.
          On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life--the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.
          With spare, graceful prose and the emotional wisdom of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker has created a singular narrator in Julia, a resilient and insightful young girl, and a moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.

MOVIE - Leviathan

R (2:20)

Limited release 12/25/2014

The Loft with Sheila on March 5. 2015

RT Critic: 99 Audience: 81

Cag: 3.5 - I liked it but it was really bleak (as I say below) and depressing

Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

Sony Pictures Classics
In Russian, with subtitles

My comments:  A bleak, interesting story that takes place somewhere on the coast of Russia, in an economically deprived village that sports a fishery where most of the women seem to work.  The mayor is out to get the land of a hard-working mechanic who is incredibly down-on-his-luck.  This is the story of a family, a community, and sneaking in and snaking around it all is the Catholic Church. Corruption.  Sadness.  Bleak. (And it didn't really help that I didn't "click" with the protagonist.)

RT Summary:  The latest drama from Andrey Zvyagintsev, the acclaimed director of The Return (Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner and Golden Globe nominee). Kolya (Alexeï Serebriakov) lives in a small fishing town near the stunning Barents Sea in Northern Russia. He owns an auto-repair shop that stands right next to the house where he lives with his young wife Lilya (Elena Liadova) and his son Roma (Sergueï Pokhodaev) from a previous marriage.

2. Lake Shore Limited - Sue Miller

Audio read by the author
2010
8 disks
288 pages
written for adults
Didn't like it (1)
Lovely writing; boring, tedious story; unlikable characters for the most part - it was a pretty endless, repetitive story.

Setting:  Post-9/11 Boston and rural Vermont.
OSS:  Four people connected to a young man who died on 9/11 tell the story of their lives and regrets a few years later.
The title:  The Lake Shore Limited is the title of the play that Billy writes, the catalyst for Billy meeting Sam, and the way that she is able to deal with the death of Gus and her feelings surrounding her own secret guilty feelings about Gus's death on 9/11.

The story weaves in, about, and around the lives of five people from the points-ov-view of four of them.  Gus, raised by his 15-years-older sister, is killed on 9/11.  So even though he is no longer alaive, he's definitely a huge part of the story.

Now, years later, Gus's girlfriend Billy, a playwright, has written a play abouit a husband whose wife might or might not have been killed in a train wreck.  The husband is not filled with grief, he's been having an affair and is not sure how he feels. This is actually a mirror of how Billy feels, she'd been about to break up with Gus, although no one else knows this., Leslie, Gus's sister, has invited her friend Sam to the opening of the play to meet Billy, to perhaps fix them up. Sam had once been in love with Leslie.  His first wife had died of cancer leaving him with three youngish sons, he had remarried and divorced after that. He's tall and good looking, Billy is extremely tiny and good looking.  The fourth voice is of Rafe, the actor who played the husband in the play, who is going though his own heartache - his wife is dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Billy and her dog are particularly unlikable, Sam has incredible snobbish tendencies raise their ugly heads, and Rafe almost seems an unneeded character, I'm not sure why he was included.

I almost stopped listening to this a dozen times, but each time I convinced myself that I'd already spent enough time with it to complete it.  Yuck.  Endless.